I’ve been reading Donald Hall. This is a dangerous thing for a poet that has committed to writing a poem a week in 2023. In his essay, “Poetry and Ambition”, Hall convincingly argues that modern poets focus too much on efficiency, publication, and mass-produced poems. He calls most modern poems “McPoems - ten billion served”.
I am turning Hall’s opinions over and over in my mind. His challenge to poets is to focus on writing great poems - something that cannot happen when the focus is writing quickly or for a large audience.
At the beginning of the essay he writes, "I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems. An ambitious project—but sensible, I think. ... If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best."
A worthy goal.
I do not know if this is a great poem. But I know it is the first in this new project; the first promised poem of 2023.
Enjoy.
(and share if you feel so moved.)
—
1. I am caught between two extremes. I am caught between two extremes. I swing and swing back, forth, back again. One side is America, Just Do It, upward mobility, ever increasing motility, more, more – The other is death, silence, this, french fries with my toddler, writing these words, this poem, now this. I float along hither and yon to fill my Amazon cart with the book that will make me wise or help devise a morning routine that rivals a robot, a machine that will produce what this other hand, other side, other way provides. The Kingdom is within. Shall I put away the map? Unlace the boots, stow the magnifying glass? Shall I nap on the deck and kiss my wife and arrive again, again, again in the Holy this?
Amazing!
I like this. You are giving voice to what Anne Carson calls "Decreation." Or, at least, I think you are.
"death, silence, this"
But then you return to french fries and the this-ness of this world.
Keep writing!